The Secret to Communicating with Kids
...is that most adults actually just don't want to do it. If you do, here are five things to try.
I’m just going to start with what might be the most controversial opinion I’ve ever written down: communicating with kids is dead easy. Easier than communicating with adults, even. When adults have trouble communicating with kids, the reason is usually that they aren’t really trying, because they don’t actually want to communicate at all.
Bold claim, right?
I’ve been around kids my whole life. I have two younger siblings, and many younger cousins. I’ve been a teacher for ten years and a parent for nine. I’ve been told over and over again by friends, relatives, and strangers that I’m good with kids.
What’s my secret?
There is none. You literally just listen to what they have to say, and respond - just the way you would respond to a friend or someone else you care about. You probably communicate with people all the time. Well, it turns out that kids are also people!
I know: mind-blowing.
The problem is that most adults have been programmed not to treat kids like people. Some of this is understandable, and some of it is less so, and in some cases there are tradeoffs to be made. Obviously, adults often need to override children’s judgment, for their own good - but I would argue that good communication helps, rather than hinders, our ability to do what’s best for children. It seems to me that adults who have trouble with this don’t actually want to communicate - they want to dominate. This works, until it doesn’t. It works until the kid can get away from you. Or gets bigger than you. Good communication, on the other hand, is self-sustaining. It forges bonds that can last a lifetime.
Domination or communication. You just have to decide which one you want.
Other than that, I do actually have some specific advice. Namely:
Don't treat them like children
Remember that they aren't adults
Involve them in things that involve them
Enjoy yourself
Model the behavior you want
So let’s go into detail.
Don’t treat them like children
You probably don’t like being treated like a child. What makes you think children like it? No one likes being talked down to, or ignored, or patronized, or disregarded, or condescended to. If you talk to an adult that way, it’s considered insulting. Why would you talk to a child that way?
When you treat a child with disregard or condescension, they generally notice, and don’t like it. You’re communicating to them that you don’t value their contributions, which means you don’t value them. Why, then, should they want to communicate with you at all?
Most adults I talk to in fact do not value the input of children. Many adults think “what could a child possibly have to say that I would find interesting?” It’s true that children will often bore you if you let them. They haven’t developed the social skills to read your body language and figure out when you’re interested and when you’re tuning out. They haven’t developed their personalities enough, smoothed out their rougher edges, learned which aspects people like and don’t like. A child might sit you down for two hours and list facts about dinosaurs. You don’t care about dinosaurs. Why should you sit and listen to that? It has no value to your life whatsoever.
I mean, that’s fine. If that’s how you feel, own it. “I don’t want to communicate with children so I’m not ever going to try” is a perfectly reasonable stance, I guess.
But supposing for a moment that you did want to communicate. What would you do if your friend sat you down and started talking about dinosaurs non-stop?
You could try to take an interest in the subject. Ask questions, and try to guide the conversation towards something you think is interesting about it. Show the friend - or the kid - how the two of you can collaborate in the conversation, so it isn’t so one-sided.
You could respond with dinosaur facts of your own. Let the kid practice turn-taking in conversation. That will be a good skill later in life.
You could politely say “I don’t want to hear any more dinosaur facts now - do you think we could talk about something else for a while?” It’s okay to be direct - it’s certainly better than letting the person talk until you are annoyed at them, or start to tune them out.
You could crack a joke.
You could suggest an activity. Drawing dinosaurs while you talk about dinosaur facts is probably a lot more fun than just listening to dinosaur facts.
When a kid tries to start a conversation with you, you should look at it as an opportunity: an opportunity to get to know the kid better, to bond, and also to teach conversational and social skills by modeling those skills (active listening, turn-taking, seeking out shared interests and fun activities) and giving direct instructions and feedback where necessary.
It’s the same with older kids, although by the time most kids are eleven or twelve they’ll start to develop more social skills - including more awareness of self, audience, and conversational nuance. They might be a bit more interested in hearing your thoughts. But they’ll still have “immature” interests. A lot of adults don’t want to talk to a twelve-year-old about twelve-year-old stuff. Again, that’s understandable. But if your goal is to communicate, you should develop the skill of taking an interest. And for the love of all that’s good in the world, don’t outright tell them that their interests are stupid, boring, and immature!
Remember that they aren’t adults
I love time travel stories. Back to the Future was one of my favorite movies as a kid. As an adult I love time travel movies and TV series. I have spent hours thinking about time travel and different models of time travel. That scene in Endgame where they were talking about different time travel models was the ultimate fan service for me.
But if you tell me, e.g., “I think time travel is a stupid and boring idea and time travel writers are stupid hacks”, I will not take it personally. I have a thick skin and a solid identity which is not strongly connected to any particular entertainment products.
Children and teenagers do not typically have these characteristics. They are working on building up their identity and part of this process involves identifying with groups, genres, cultural products, and (increasingly in modern times) genders and sexualities. Kids will show off “who they are” by putting stickers on their laptops to signal to others that they like this musical group, or that anime, or whatever. If you tell them that their music is noise and that animated shows are kid stuff, they will experience it not just as rejection of their tastes, but as rejection period. They will conclude that you don’t like them, or that you can’t relate to them. This conclusion is not unreasonable.
So if you do like kids, and if you do want to relate to them, don’t reject them! Let them share their tastes with you. If you don’t like something, be honest about your personal reaction, in a kind way: “I don’t really enjoy this type of music” rather than “this isn’t even music”. “I could never get into anime” rather than “cartoons are for kids”. It helps if you’re open-minded enough to actually give the thing a chance. The first time I tried Minecraft I did not have any fun at all. I gave it a second chance because my son got into it, and now we play together and build things together on our family server, and I like it so much I even play without him sometimes. Some of my students got me to listen to Billie Eilish - who is really quite talented - and others to watch Supernatural, which I ended up enjoying despite the fact that less than three percent of its episodes involved time travel. It turns out kids sometimes like fun or interesting things after all.
I’ve seen so many adults openly call children’s things “stupid” - your toys are stupid, your shows are stupid, your interests are stupid, your problems are stupid - and then they wonder why the kids slowly stop valuing their opinions. I guess it’s just one of life’s great mysteries.
Even the discourse that comic book movies are “for kids” - universally understood to be an insult - embraces the broad social idea that adults need to put away childish things because those things are inherently of inferior quality. Even if this were true - which it isn’t - it wouldn’t be something that would be good for children to hear. Again, children broadly tend to be more sensitive and more likely to take these insults personally. I’m not saying it’s going to scar them for life or anything - I think kids are also pretty resilient - but if you are an adult and your goal is to communicate with kids, then you need to be extra mindful about saying things that will hurt them and thereby cause them to pull away from you and reduce or cut off communication.
Involve them in things that involve them
Again, I’m framing this in a way that makes it seem like it should be obvious, but again many adults have “trouble” with this not because it is conceptually difficult but because they have no interest in doing it. Adults tend to view children as accessories at best and nuisances on average, and so they approach the idea of involving kids in anything with a mixture of reluctance and dread.
Speaking professionally now, I can say that one of the things you learn in teacher training is to give students “choice and voice” because it makes them take ownership of their own education. The idea is that children should view education as something they are doing, rather than something which is being done to them. In theory, student choice can improve engagement which in turn improves behavior and academic achievement. Obviously, a lot depends on how teachers actually structure and present the choices in practice.
I apply this principle to parenting as well. If my kids are going to eat dinner, I want them involved in deciding what’s for dinner and getting dinner ready. Now, that doesn’t mean that we eat cake and ice cream for dinner every day, because I am not a lunatic and I understand that kids need adults to set boundaries. What it means is that I try to present my kids with a choice between a couple of (healthy, feasible) options on most days and let them make special requests (which are, of course, subject to approval) at least once a week. Kids can be involved in decision-making without having the kids calling the shots completely.
I am definitely not suggesting that you pretend to give your kids options or present something as an option when it is in fact a requirement. Don’t say “would you like to go to the dentist now” and then if your kid says “no” respond with “too bad, you have to.” False choices are manipulative bullshit, and kids recognize it and will not respect you if you do it. If you have to get your kid to do something unpleasant, be direct, explain what has to be done and why, and solicit and address their feelings about it. Kids will put up with a lot of unpleasantness as long as they feel like they are being heard and considered.
Again, a lot of this stuff would be obvious in any context not involving kids. You wouldn’t call a friend and say “get dressed, I’m taking you to the dentist”. If your friend really needed a dentist you’d find a way to communicate that and persuade them. “You’ve been complaining about that tooth for a week - you know the longer you let it go the worse it’s going to be. If you don’t get it filled now it could be a root canal later.”
The only reason we don’t try to persuade kids of things is that we think we don’t have to. We usually only interact with kids that we have power over, and so we have a tendency to fall back on using that power, by default, because it’s expedient. But then one day, the power doesn’t work anymore - the kid has learned how to resist - and then what are we left with? We’re left with whatever methods and habits of communication we established while we had the chance. If you didn’t bother to establish any basis of trust and communication at all - any method at all of relating to that kid and convincing them to do what’s best for them - well, then, congratulations: you’ve produced a completely alienated teenager. Good luck ever repairing that relationship; it’s too late. You’ve blown it, and you can never get those years back.
Enjoy yourself
Most kids are highly perceptive and empathetic. They will pick up on it if you act like being around them is a chore. If that’s how you actually feel about kids, then I encourage you not to have any and not to teach any. Most of the kids I’ve taught with behavioral problems have been kids whose parents openly treated them as burdens and annoyances, even at parent-teacher meetings. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear a mother say that her son talks too much at home, and realize that here, sitting in front of you, is the reason that kid talks too much in your class: he comes to school and begs for the attention he can’t get at home.
I’m not saying it’s always the parents’ fault when kids misbehave. (I mean, it usually is, but not always.) I’m just saying that if you know in advance that you don’t enjoy being around kids, please consider the impact that will have on your own kids once they figure out that you can’t stand having them around - which they will.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, because the opposite holds true as well: the more you genuinely enjoy being with kids, the more kids will enjoy being with you. They’ll open up to you. You can’t fake it - you can’t be overbearing and pretend that being around kids is the thrill of a lifetime - because kids and especially teens are remarkably good at spotting a phony and attuned to nuances of who is actually having fun and who is trying too hard to present a fun demeanor while they’re actually dying inside.
To beat this drum again: you probably know how to enjoy yourself when you are with friends. You might exchange jokes. You might play games. You might talk about some piece of entertainment you’ve both consumed, or about other topics of shared interests. You might try to learn more about each other. Again: all of these strategies work with kids!
I told my son this classic joke a few weeks ago:
Q) What’s brown and sticky?
A) A stick!
He loved it. He repeated the joke to his mom and his sister, and then also back to me the next day. He brought the joke up again several times that week. A few days later he said “that joke was funny because I thought you were going to say ‘poop’ but then you said ‘a stick’”. And I said “that’s right, that is why it’s funny.” He’s not only enjoyed the joke - he’s explicitly drawn a conclusion about how the joke worked, which points to the idea that comedy is built on violated expectations, and also silly references to bodily functions. And like… that joke is super funny when you’re eight, but also I first heard it in college. We love to pretend that we’re above childish things, but we also love to share oblique poop jokes well into our 20s.
You have to be open to the idea that you, an adult, can enjoy something that a child can also enjoy. That you aren’t the Very Serious Authority, but a person with many roles, and that you can enact the “parent” role or the “teacher” role while also relating to the kid on their level, and these do not contradict each other but enhance each other. In other words, you have to avoid closing yourself off from enjoying childish jokes, or kids’ movies, or video games, or whatever it is you think adults should be too mature and serious to enjoy.
And relatedly, I think you’ll find that kids often have fewer layers of pretension to pierce before you can get to a point of shared enjoyment. Like, an adult has to pretend not to like Billie Eilish, or Minecraft, or Frozen, or Iron Man - otherwise other adults might not take that person seriously. Kids don’t have to worry about that stuff - at least, not until adults teach them to worry about it. But what if we just… didn’t? I’m not the only one in my generation to reject the idea that adults have to stop liking comic books or video games or pop stars or Disney movies. I think it’s time as a society to stop pretending that these things aren’t enjoyable for people of all ages, and in the process alienating the next generation of children.
And again: maybe you personally don't like Disney movies or whatever. That’s fine. You can be authentic to your own tastes without finding ways to put down others’ tastes. You’d extend that courtesy to your friends - you’d say “Disney movies aren’t for me” rather than “Disney movies are stupid and childish” - so why not extend it to children? But better yet, give Frozen a chance. It’s a masterpiece of film.
Model the behavior you want
In some sense this is a rehash or reframing of the previous sections. If you want kids to listen to you, you have to listen to them. Show them what listening looks like. Model active listening, where your body language and your responses work together to show that you are listening. Too many adults think they can just talk at kids and the kids have to listen because they are a captive audience. Of course there are circumstances where a parent or a teacher absolutely has to lecture a kid. But the lecture will only work if the kid knows how to listen to it, which is more likely to occur when the kid has already internalized effective communication skills. The lecture will only work if the kid chooses to listen to it, which is more likely if the adult has established some mutual respect with the kid through prior communication.
Honestly this advice is easy to type out but hard to practice - modeling active listening isn’t always easy, especially when there are multiple kids competing for your attention. Anyone can get impatient, or flustered, or tired. As parents and teachers, we’ll make mistakes. We’ll snap at our kids or students. It happens. But if it’s an uncharacteristic deviation from the norm, we can apologize and move on. If it’s a habit, we’re mostly teaching kids to avoid us.
If you want kids to take an interest in what you have to say, then model it by taking an interest in what they have to say. If you want kids to make the right decisions, then involve them in decisions so they can see how decisions are made, and give them options as often as possible so that they have guided practice with making good decisions. If you want kids to enjoy their time with you, model it by enjoying your time with them, whether it means putting the work in to identify or develop common interests, or just opening your mind to the possibility that something they like might appeal to you as well if you don’t dismiss it out of hand. If you want kids to treat you with respect, show them what it looks like to communicate respectfully rather than dismissively or condescendingly.
In other words, you can be a communication role model. You probably already know how to communicate. You just need to break the mental block that society drills into adults with stupid mantras like “children should be seen and not heard” and “when I became an adult I put away childish things”, and choose to let yourself apply your adult communication skills to children.
I think many adults take a perverse pride in not being able to relate to children and teenagers. They view this as “maturity” or present it as having moved so far beyond a prior state of being that the internal world of a kid is completely unintelligible and incompatible with their new Very Serious Adult Existence. Perhaps the root of this performative adulthood is insecurity, or perhaps they’re just doing it because their parents/role models did it to them and so that’s the way they think it ought to be.
In college I had a friend - I’ll call him “Sam” - who was shockingly happy and well-adjusted. He was easy-going, smart, and fun to be around. He had a great sense of humor, and also a quality that I can only describe as “inner peace” - and I know how odd that sounds, but it was practically contagious. Once his parents came to visit him at college and they came to our board games club and played board games with us. That was the moment when I understood Sam. He was so comfortable with himself that he made everyone else more comfortable just by being around him, and that self-comfort came from a deeply affirming family life - from parents who were involved with him in ways that most parents are not involved with their kids.
I’m not saying that every family in which the parents play board games with their adult children is automagically happy and well-adjusted. Rather, this - along with the guy’s overall demeanor and personality - was an outward manifestation of parents who had forged a strong connection with their kids. I’ve stayed in touch with Sam and he parents his own kids the same way. I’ve made the decision to parent my kids the same way. People respond when they see good role models - when they see a positive example of good practice, and see its results.
As individuals, we can make the choice: do we model aloofness, disregard for others’ interests, condescension, disdain, and negative feedback for children who try to communicate with us? Do we model getting what we want by browbeating and demeaning people into submitting to our superior power? Or do we model better communication, active listening, turn-taking, decision-making, social skills, openness and open-mindedness, and real human connection? Our children will follow our lead.
None of this is conceptually difficult. Almost all adults have almost all of these skills. We just have to want to share them. We just have to view children as worthwhile of positive attention and good role models. We just have to think ahead, and approach children with an eye towards building the type of relationship that we want with them long-term - towards helping them become the type of person that we want them to be in the long run.
“Children learn what they live”
I’ve made it a point to note that none of this advice is groundbreaking. None of it is actually a secret. I remember in my childhood the local Hallmark store sold plaques with the “Children learn what they live” poem printed on them. It made a deep and lifelong impression on me. It was the first time I realized that some of the ways adults in my life were treating me were not okay. It gave me the courage to stand up for myself and the resolve to get away from people who didn’t treat me with the respect I deserved. It gave me hope, knowing that there were other people in the world who recognized that children are sentient human beings whose inner lives are as important and meaningful as an adult’s.
I’ll share it in hopes that it inspires you as well.
Beautiful...